Advertisements play a crucial role for all kinds of marketers and across all kind of mediums whether offline or online. Right targeting & message are two pillars of success for any kind of advertisement. Google Adwords have been in existence for almost 10 years now and have helped millions of marketers around the world. Despite the introduction of highly successful Facebook Adverts which are targeting based, Google Adwords have their own niche & utility i.e. being search based.

Brief Introduction

Google Adwords have 3 levels of penetration: Campaigns, Ad groups and Ads respectively, where Campaigns represent your goals, Ad groups your products and Ads final presentation to the users. For instance if Digital Vidya has a goal to generate leads for our social media workshop in Mumbai, the campaign can be named as ‘Social Media Workshop Mumbai’ and Ad groups can be named as ‘Facebook Marketing Course’, ‘Twitter Marketing Training’, ‘LinkedIn Marketing Course’ etc and finally number of Ads (both Image & Text) can be launched under each Ad group which are seen by the end user in the form of horizontal or vertical banners (in case of Image or placement ads) or search display (in case of Text or search ads).

Choosing the Right Keywords

You can start with the official Google Keyword Tool to search for relevant keywords related to your products or services. This tool works as a bottom up approach where you search for keywords by inputting keywords or websites which you think are related to your business and it provides competitive analysis as in how many people bid on the same keywords as you.

Another useful tool to choose relevant keywords is Google Insights for Search. This tool works as a top down approach where you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties & then narrow down to few keywords.

The idea of Ad Groups is to club together relevant keywords in a single place. For instance, in the case of Ad Group ‘Facebook Marketing Course’, relevant keywords will be Facebook Marketing, Facebook Marketing Course, Facebook Training etc.

Google Keyword Tool can be used to choose keywords which are neither too competitive that they become too costly for you nor which are too cheap and are not even searched by users on google.

Matching the Keywords

There are 3 types of matches in Google Keyword Tool which let you choose the right combination of Keywords.

1) As a beginner, one can start with Broad Match which is there by default on the Tool. For instance if Digital Vidya chooses ‘social media’ keyword, upon the search our online advertisement has the eligibility to appear when a user request has both or either of the words, plural forms, synonyms and other variations. But the downside of this keyword match is that you might target people who don’t really fall in your target market.

2) If you want your advertisement to show only if the user searches for a phrase that exactly matches your own then Phrase Match should be used. E.g. if the keyword is “digital vidya”, the advertisement will only appear if the user phrase matches the two words in the exact order.

3) If you want more targeting & the search phrase to be exactly the same, in the same order and with no other terms in the search query then you should use Exact Match.

Apart from that there are 2 more options to enhance your reach & targeting. You can ‘include’ or ‘exclude’ particular terms which will fine tune your targeting. These can be seen in the screen shot below in the top left corner.

2) Search engine optimization (SEO) and Google Adwords have a correlation. As per our experience, better the SEO, better will be the organic search and in return better will be the paid search & vice-versa. Landing page (the URL which you have put into the Ads) should have appropriate keywords related to what you have put into the Ads. It should not be that the Ads display ‘Social Media, Facebook etc’ whereas the landing page doesn’t have these keywords. This reduces the chances of generating any leads if your purpose is to generate leads rather than just clicks.

3) Always change the default settings before launching your campaign. E.g. geographical area, automatic bidding & ad rotation (which allows you to alter the frequency of showing different ad campaigns) are some areas which are set by default to United States and “show better performing ad more often” by default. So, it is important to customize these settings before the final launch.

What other ways can you suggest to improve the Google Adwords Campaign? Please share your views in the comment box below.